In this timely examination of television and American identity, Cummins and Gordon take readers on an informed walk through the changes that TV has already wrought-and those still likely to confront us. Commercial television in America is less than 60 years old, yet it has had an enormous impact on what we like, what we do, what we know, and how we think. A family transplanted from the 1940s to the present day would certainly be stunned by a fundamentally different world: instead of gathering in the living room for a shared evening of radio, they would be scattered around the house to indulge their individual interests on one of a hundred cable channels; instead of a society with rigid racial and ethnic divisions, they would see people of different ethnicities in passionate embraces; and certainly they would see a very different set of values reflected across the board. They would, in sum, find themselves in an unrecognizable America, one both reflected in and shaped by television, a medium that has been shown to have an unprecedented influence on our lives both for better and for worse. By focusing on the development of television within the cultural context that surrounds it, and drawing on such phenomena as quiz shows, comedy hours, the Kennedy assassination, the Olympics, sitcoms, presidential ads, political debates, MTV, embedded journalism, and reality TV, the authors reveal television's impact on essential characteristics of American life. They cover topics as diverse as politics, crime, medicine, sports, our perceptions, our values, our assumptions about privacy, and our unquenchable need for more "things." In addition, they consider the future of the medium in the light of theproliferation of programming options, the prevalence of cameras and receivers in our lives, the growing links between TV and computers, and the crossed boundaries of television throughout the world.

Infidelity anyone? Vicariously enjoy the unfaithfulness of twenty-four writers in this anthology, Runnin' Around, subtitled The Serving House Book of Infidelity. The cover is a black- and-white Mark Hillringhouse photograph of an appropriately seedy motel advertising day-rates. However, the content is not seedy at all, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn, who leads off with a poem that originally appeared in the New Yorker, inspiring editors Kennedy and Cummins to solicit eleven poets, two essayists, and eleven fiction writers to take a turn at telling a tale of infidelity, be it carnal or spiritual or somewhere in between. Included is the work of poets Dunn, Jack Ridl, H. L. Hix, Laura McCullough, Rick Mulkey, Steve Davenport, Renee Ashley, Dan Turell, Elisabeth Murawski, Flower Conroy, and Mark Hillringhouse, essays by Rebecca Chace and Minna Proctor, and short stories by Timmy Waldron, Per Smidl, Duff Brenna, Roisin McLean, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Greg Herriges, Susan Tekulve, Dennis F. Bormann and Kennedy and Cummins as well. Read it and lust

The worlds of these stories challenge the realities we think we inhabit, bending them away from a norm, some just a shade askew, others warped into a radical strangeness. All confound our expectations.

A man who can't bring himself to return to the apartment of his failing marriage, a woman spied on by a neighbor, a father terrified by the four-year- old next door, a boy living in a house haunted by his mother's madness, a mother whose children are freezing in a heatless bedroom--the characters in the Stories of Local Music are unsettled in their own homes, their lives dissonant and discordant.

The Book of Worst Meals contains essays by 25 writers on their worst culinary experiences, tales of wretched dining in Paris, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and throughout the UK, as well as disastrous holiday meals and the food of failed relationships.

Whether on a resort island, on a bus burrowing through the darkness, disoriented in European cities and villages, fearful at a lakeside table or on a mountain climb, bewildered in the crypt of the Vatican or in rooms and landscapes suddenly strange, the people in these sixteen stories don't know where they are or who they are. They struggle to locate themselves in their lives.